An Investigation Of Contrastive Rhetoric Used In Chinese English Major Writing

Contrastive Rhetoric Hypothesis (CRH), originally developed by American linguist Kaplan, R. B. (1966), seeks to analyze rhetorical paradigms accepted in various cultures and specify the differences among them. The major theoretical claims of the hypothesis are that different speech communities have different ways of organizing ideas in writing that the rhetorical conventions of students'first language interfere with their second language writing.Always bearing the aim of doing full justice to contrastive rhetoric in English major writing situation in mind, the author will contrastively analyze 80 compositions written by 40 freshmen and 40 juniors respectively in this study, only to find no great differences existed in terms of rhetorical patterns between the two groups. Moreover, questionnaire and structured interview are also employed, results of which will be served as further evidence.This study is especially devoted to demonstrate that the contrastive rhetoric, with its purpose of facilitating writing in a second language, has received limited attention in college English writing instruction in China. When writing in English, the English major students are still under influence of Chinese writing conventions. The unexpected findings demand adequate considerations among Chinese writing teachers, which may in turn provide insight to the improvement of their instruction and benefit English major students at large. The differences due to culturally preferred rhetorical structures are often ignored by learners and go unnoticed unless they are directly addressed. It is recommended that English writing teachers should combine contrastive rhetoric into their writing instruction and try to arouse students'cognitive awareness.